Saturday, May 07, 2005

Wrestling the Irrational

While the Seattle Silly Times glorifies a father that wants to sue his middle school aged daughter’s way into wrestling matches against unwilling boy opponents, we should pause for a moment to reflect. Since the mainstream media will only focus on the so-called “civil rights” and politically correct aspects of this story, we should focus on the rational reasons for why it is not always acceptable to force little boys to wrestle with little girls. In fact, we should focus on the basic rights of our boys.

In her landmark book on the plight of boys in our public schools entitled The War Against Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers the hostile environment boys encounter in public education (and private universities, for that matter). Hoff Sommers, a recognized and serious scholar, was moved to write her book after the ridiculous mid-1990’s claim that girls “loose their voice” in high school. She wanted to learn more, but found that the claim was baseless. Worse, she found that boys show very tangible evidence that the feminized public school environment is having a real and very negative effect on their development.The problems she found included the fact that teen boys are several times more likely than teen girls to drop out of high should or commit suicide. Moreover, the boys that remain in school are far underachieving girls. If anything, she conncluded, boys have their voice muzzled in schools that are dominated by the politically correct and feminized agenda of our nation’s public school system.

And then there is Title IX, which mandates that equal money be spent on male and female sports in all publicly funded schools. The number of opportunities created for women athletes has increased and that is very positive, but the irrational implementation of Title IX has demolished an even greater number of athletic opportunities for boys and men. Within college sports, for example, there is no adjustment made for the money raised by men’s football and basketball, which financially support all of the other programs in a schools athletic program.

Because football has so many players, the only way to have equal numbers of male and female athletes in many universities is to eliminate male sports programs. For example, many men’s wrestling programs in universities across the country have been eliminated in order to reduce the number of men in sports and balance them with the number of females. Often, this is done because colleges just cannot find enough young women that want to participate in sports.

With that backdrop, it is not hard to believe that Meaghan Connors’ father would be threatening law suites simply because boys on the wrestling teams of private schools choose to forfeit their matches to her instead of wrestle a girl. The “offending” private schools are all Christian and they claim that it is inappropriate for girls and boys to be making such close physical contact. Why it is that Meaghan Connors’ father believes that he can force a little boy to wrestle his daughter when his beliefs, and those of his parents and his school forbid it, is anybody’s guess.

Any rational person would have to say that Mr. Connors’ is wrong. In fact, we would go even further. No boy in a public school should be forced to wrestle Meaghan, period. Even though the radical feminists that run our public schools will never admit it, there are major developmental differences between boys and girls. Girls tend to physically mature much more quickly than boys. In fact, walk around any middle school and you will find that girls on average are taller and larger than boys.

Is it fair to match up smaller boys against larger girls in a wrestling match? They don’t do that in high school or college where it would not even be a match up. But, the humiliation a boy would feel (in the subsequent ribbing) seems not to be a concern for the feminists that run public schools. In fact, they seem to enjoy the idea of bashing an adolescent male’s ego while it is in its formative years. Indeed, they hope it will have a lasting impact on the poor kid.

No, forcing boys to wrestle girls is not a good idea. The fact that Seattle area public schools routinely do this is an indication of the destructive pathology of feminism. And, it shows that boys are second class citizens in our public schools. In a system that seems to believe that self-esteem is more important that learning the 4 R’s, you would be reasonable to expect that they would care about the awkward position they are putting boys into. But, in fact, they relish.

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